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Lost golf courses: Past homes of birdies, bunkers and errant drives

By , Daily Memphian Updated: August 08, 2024 10:28 AM CT | Published: August 05, 2024 4:00 AM CT

As the population shifted and the open tracts of land transformed into subdivisions, a number of golf courses have disappeared from the local landscape.

Some sand traps and putting greens turned into large-scale developments. Other fairways gave way to stores and offices. Some links relocated or simply closed with a little topography still lingering on the site to indicate a golf course once occupied the land.

Some were private clubs; others were public courses that were a centerpiece of city parks. Some private courses moved from one spot to another in a land swap or abandoning one piece of property for another farther outside the city.


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Among the previous private clubs around the area were Bella Vista, a favorite of many in Whitehaven, on Briargate, a layout that was in the middle of nowhere, east of a desolate exit on Interstate 55 in DeSoto County — an area that now is the clogged commercial Goodman Road corridor. Woodland Hills was near Macon and Houston Levee, and Cordova Club was west of Germantown Parkway, straddling Cordova Road on the back route to Bellevue Baptist Church.

And, of course, Germantown Country Club’s land is making way for a subdivision at Kimbrough and Farmington.

As L. LaSimba Gray Jr. notes in his research for his recently released book “Out of Bounds: A History of African Americans and Golf in Memphis, Tennessee,” there was a nine-hole course at Douglass Park, and a seven-hole course at Lincoln Park, both of which opened in the mid-1900s.

Here are some of the layouts that once dotted a city map that are now no more than a memory of pars, bogeys, lost lake balls and duffed wedge shots.


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Clay Bailey

Clay Bailey

Clay Bailey, a lifelong Memphian, has worked as a reporter in the city four decades. He concentrated on suburban coverage for the bulk of his career, except for a stint as sports editor of The Daily Memphian when it launched in September 2018. He now is suburban editor and also serves as a freelance sports writer for The Associated Press.


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